People prefer AI-generated poetry over Shakespeare and Byron because it is more ‘beautiful’ and easier to understand, a study has found.
In the experiment some real works by major literary figures, who also included Chaucer and TS Eliot, were compared to imitations of their styles generated by ChatGPT
More than three-quarters of people preferred the AI poems to real ones, with study participants giving them a score one mark higher on average on a seven-point scale.
The AI-generated poems were deemed to have better rhythm and more beauty in the blind tests, where participants did not know which ones were ‘authentic’.
But when they were told ahead of time which ones were AI and which ones were real, they overall graded the AI poems as worse.
The researchers also tested whether people could tell the difference between real and fake poems.
Results revealed that people cannot spot an AI fake, mistakenly thinking AI poems were genuine in 58.5 per cent of cases.
Meanwhile actual human-written poems were correctly identified just 51.7 per cent of the time.
People prefer AI-generated poetry over Shakespeare and Byron because it is more ‘beautiful’ and easier to understand, a study has found
Data from the study show that all of the five poems that were liked the most and deemed to be of the highest quality were produced by AI not the likes of Shakespeare
Study author Dr Brian Porter from the University of Pittsburgh said: ‘The strength of the preference is not overwhelming, but the preference is very consistent.
‘Our results suggest that people cannot identify AI-generated poems, and that they prefer AI-generated poems to human-written poems.
‘In fact, AI-generated poems were more likely to be judged to be human-written than the actual human-written poems were.’
The scientists recruited a range of Americans online, with an even split of men and women and an average of around 40.
Scientists collected five lesser known works each from ten different hoistorical poets, who also included American luminaries such as Sylvia Plath and Emily Dickinson.
They then made 50 new poems by telling ChatGPT 3.5: ‘Write a short poem in the style of ’.
Data from the study show that all of the five poems that were liked the most and deemed to be of the highest quality were produced by AI.
In contrast, the five lowest-rated poems were all real, including Shakespeare’s Sonnet 31 and Chaucer’s Rondel of Merciless Beauty.
As an example, Lord Byron’s ‘A Riddle, On the Letter E’, reads: ‘The beginning of eternity, the end of time and space;
‘The beginning of every end, and the end of every place.’
The study compared Lord Byron’s ‘A Riddle, On the Letter E’ and a poem created by AI
The five lowest-rated poems were all real, including Shakespeare’s Sonnet 31 and Chaucer’s Rondel of Merciless Beauty.
In comparison, the AI generated the following: ‘She walks in beauty, like the night,
‘A vision of grace, a pure delight;
‘With every step, a poem in motion,
‘A sight to behold, a heart’s devotion.’
Dr Porter said: ‘We think that the AI-generated poems were preferred by our participants because the AI-generated poems were easier to understand, and it was easier to get something out of them in one reading.’
‘When you only have time to read something once, the more straightforward poem that you immediately understand becomes the one you prefer.’
But he added: ‘I don’t think this necessarily means that in general we would rather read computer-generated sonnets than read Shakespeare.
‘People want poems to be written by a human being who is trying to communicate something to you, the reader.
‘It just turns out that we’re pretty unreliable when it comes to identifying which poems are generated by AI and which poems are written by a human being.’